Arrow Keys and Word Processing Programs

Here’s a cool little arrow trick to try with word processing programs. Next time you’re using your arrow keys to go from one area of a sentence to another (left and right arrows), hold down your CTRL key.

Instead of moving one space at a time, you’ll go one word at a time.

If you’re using the up and down arrows to go from line to line, holding down the CTRL key will make your cursor jump from paragraph to paragraph (well, from carriage return to carriage return anyway).

One last thing, if you hold down the SHIFT key while you do this (i.e. hold down SHIFT + CTRL at the same time), you select text as you arrow along. I’ve tested this in MS Word, Wordpad, Notepad and Open Office Writer, but it *should* work no matter what word processing program you use. Now you don’t have any reason to take your hands off the keyboard at all!